Friday, July 10, 2009

So-Called Date Weekend

I'm excited. For the next two days, I will have the husband all to myself. With no kids. Wait, is that a foreign phrase? I repeat...NO KIDS! I know what you're thinking (get your head out of the gutter), and all I can say is I wish. Because this is no second honeymoon. Or even a dinner out.

Today we're going to our first CHEA convention. It is not a convention dedicated to chia pets, although there probably is such a thing. CHEA stands for Christian Home Educators Association. Either that or Chimp and Elephant Association.

The convention is THE homeschooling convention of the area, the one where everyone who has ever homeschooled goes to at least once in their lives. When people talk about homeschooling conventions, this is the one they're talking about. Sidenote: one thing I love about living here in the LA area is we never miss out on anything. Every vendor and their mother comes through here. A worthy trade-off for the smog, no?

There is so much information to be had that I'm dragging the husband along to cover the workshops that I can't. For two years now, I've managed to avoid the hoopla and craziness, but this year I need to seriously arm myself. With a Heckler & Koch MP5. Because starting in the fall, I'm going to start homeschooling my son.

I am going to go for it even though my son is often unruly, often disobedient, and often drives me crazy. He's not just a different gender from my daughter, who was pretty much made for homeschooling; he's a different species. And not just a different species like the western meadowlark vs. the eastern meadowlark but like Homo sapiens vs. Staphylococcus aureas.

Ha! And people say I never use my biology.

Where was I? Oh yes, moaning and groaning about homeschooling my son.

He's not exactly thrilled at the prospect of being homeschooled either. We tried to psych him out about it, telling him exciting thing after exciting thing. You can play whenever you want! You can snack whenever you want! You can learn math while bouncing the ball off the wall! You can go to the zoo to do school! So do you want to?

He responded, "I guess."

For him, I will be attending the Understanding Learning Differences, Difficulties & Disabilities, Parts 1-3 workshops while the husband gets to go to stuff like Help! I'm Married to a Homeschooling Mom and Youtube, Myspace & blogs, Oh My!

Nice to know that what I'm facing is so enormous that someone managed to come up with a whole day's worth of information.

So. We have our his and hers schedules all marked up, the kids all shipped out to the grandparents, the pen & paper ready, the snacks secretly stashed on our bodies, and cash handy for all the impulse curricula everyone keeps telling us we're sure to buy.

And of course the camera so that I can blog all about my romantic weekend.